The impacts of ransomware and other breaches that exploit failures in risk management are preventable. An attack can come at any time, and failing to implement a strong prevention strategy is a recipe for disaster.

Although traditional anti-malware approaches tend to focus on looking deep within each endpoint for suspicious activity, in the case of ransomware particularly, this equates to monitoring the coal miners and when an event happens, you’ve just lost a miner.

If we were to place as much emphasis on monitoring events that take place on our IT systems as we do monitoring spending habits and shoplifting, many of the data breaches we hear about today could be largely mitigated.

An established Root of Trust, combined with industry standards like those adopted by the payments industry and ongoing dialogues among leaders in the field, will ensure the automotive industry stays ahead of security risks associated with connected vehicles.

In the age of stolen passwords, compromised credentials are the easiest way in, simpler than phishing, malware or exploits. “Password confirmation” tools are now readily available to find reused passwords matching any website.

Besides the usual precautions, encryption can put a huge dent in the problem by making stored information unintelligible to intruders. Self-encrypting drives further help by minimizing the performance impact by offloading encryption to specialized hardware and taking humans out of the picture.

When I spoke on the need for cybersecurity innovation at the January ITEXPO conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., I sensed something interesting about my cybersecurity colleagues: They don't seem to care about innovation; they care about having a job in cybersecurity.